


little fox

by whalersandsailors



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Background Character Death, Character Study, Childhood Memories, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, terror bingo 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-02-10
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:08:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22644631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whalersandsailors/pseuds/whalersandsailors
Summary: She knew from a young age that she would walk the same path as her father, sing the same songs, but it was too soon. She longed for home, even when she never left.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 20
Collections: The Terror Bingo (2019)





	little fox

**Author's Note:**

> written for the terror bingo prompt: **King William Land**

**i.**

She was too young, her father patiently explained to her as he left her behind.

_The time will come when you will sing its song. But not today. Not for a while yet._

She waited underneath her blankets in the warmth of the tent until her father’s footsteps faded. She redressed into her parka, mindful to blow out the gas lamp before she ventured into the gray dusk and hunted her father’s trail.

Notes hung distant on the air, like the memory of a song. Her ears pricked, and she followed the sound.

Her feet slid over the uneven rocks, and she paused when she heard a rustle nearby. She fell to her knees and belly, prepared to flatten herself into the rocks surrounding her, when a black snout and beady eyes poked from a fresh snowdrift several yards away. The fox was small, a child same as she. It shook the snow from its fur before it sniffed the air and pawed along the desolate ground.

Silna sat up on her haunches and glanced about, but she saw no other foxes along the snow or rock. She pulled her hood back, and the fox turned to her. Unafraid, the small thing held her gaze as if to ask who she was, where she came from.

_Perhaps are you alone as well?_

“Silna!” Her father’s voice resonated even when he kept it low. Silna yanked her hood back up, in some foolish belief that she might blend into the gray rocks about her.

Her father tromped on the ground to her side. His bag dangled empty at his hip, where it had been filled with fresh seal meat earlier.

He crouched to her level, the frown on his face worried.

“I told you to wait in the tent,” he groused as he helped her to her feet. 

Silna kept silent, all arguments dying on her tongue as she keenly felt her father’s disapproval. When he took her hand, leading them back to their camp, she looked over her shoulder for the fox, but the creature was nowhere to be seen.

**ii.**

With winter came scarcer food, the disappearing sun, and a cold so deep it penetrated Silna’s bones.

They ventured rarely out of their houses, snug within their iced walls. Their food was dwindling, though Silna’s father and the other hunters kept most of the fear from the little ones’ ears.

Silna knew how to listen, and she saw the fatigue etched into her father’s face. He brought their dinner, as her mother was still sick in bed, and Silna did not say a word when she noticed the portion was meager. Her father took incredibly small bites of his meat, saving most of it for Silna and his wife.

The gas lamp flickered from an unseen draft as her father staggered to his feet and, hunched from the low roof of the igloo, padded across the tiny room to Silna’s bed-ridden mother. He fed her with aching tenderness, even when most of it was spat back up. Her mother groaned, thrashing in her feverish haze.

Silna wanted to ask if they were being punished. Some of the older children thought so, sons and daughters of hunters who came back empty-handed, believing the land was spurning their efforts and casting the animals somewhere far away from their island.

She watched as her mother fell into a fitful sleep, and her father stroked her pallid cheek.

It was not the time for such questions. She focused on chewing her food slowly, to make it last longer.

**iii.**

Amidst the crash of hailstones and thunder, Silna heard another crack, sharper than lightning, higher-pitched than _Tuunbaq_ ’s cry.

The night was black, but the blood spilling from the hole in her father’s chest onto the ground was blacker.

A ringing throbbed between her ears, deafening the noise of the storm where it raged above her. As she watched her father stumble to his knees, clutching his chest, she realized that her mouth was open. She realized she was screaming.

No amount of wails could close the wound in her father, and like a cornered animal, she lashed at the figures that surrounded her, emerging from the murky crags in the ice. Her head whipped wildly from side-to-side as she tried to make out their shadowed faces.

Silna and her father left the main camp several weeks ago, traversing the rock and ice, following where _Tuunbaq_ walked. He carried with them their offerings and his songs, with her at his side to learn. _Tuunbaq_ remained elusive, but if that bothered her father, he shielded his concerns from her.

 _Something stirs the land and the sea,_ he explained softly to her one night over the fire. _We must find him and make right what is wrong._

Tears stung her eyes, freezing as they clung to her lashes and collected on her cheeks.

Silna heard a familiar roar as she hid her face in her father’s parka and sobbed.

**iv.**

The room was overly hot, despite the ice outside. Silna removed her outer parka and sat as tightly pressed against the wall as she could manage, eyes lifted to the frosted windows of the room. The black squares stared down at her as malevolently as the dark eyes of a bear stalking his prey. She glanced away when the darkness became too much and hugged her knees tighter to her chest.

Anxiety and grief rolled together in a single great maelstrom in her chest, as her father lay dead in the other wooden prison, and she powerless to leave. Foreign noises surrounded her, each one making her ears twitch and eyes dart about the room — ice crushing the wood; heavy footfalls above her head or through the walls; the disinterested shuffling of the dog as he watched her from the opposite end of the room; the restless swaying of the pale-haired man where he stood sentry nearby.

Silna did not know what the men intended to do with her or with her father’s body, and she tried to not linger on her fears. Her father always taught her to focus on whatever was at hand, not to worry about what came before or what was to come.

When her mother died, she had sobbed at her bedside for hours. When the crying stopped, she sat motionless with a hollow heart, until her father crouched on the ground beside her, held her against his chest, and whispered in her ear.

 _She will want you to move forward, little fox,_ he had said, kissing her forehead and wiping away stray tears. _Remember her as she was and treasure what she left behind. We will mourn today. We will mourn tomorrow. We will mourn her for the rest of our days. But we will also live for her. Because she still lives within us._

His words echoed in her head, their wisdom as immeasurable as they felt unattainable, from where she sat amongst her furs in the blisteringly hot room. Near-drowning in her grief, Silna blinked away the fresh wave of tears and focused her gaze on the windows once more.

**v.**

She did not run from them, as much as her feet longed to flee. She could hear the men talking among themselves as they turned back toward their ship, and she descended deeper into the icy maze before her.

With her knife, she etched the foundation of her house onto the ground, same as her parents did and had taught her to do. The shaping and stacking of the ice bricks was exhausting work to do alone, but the sun had just dipped out of sight by the time she finished and crawled inside.

She sliced away more of the seal’s blubber, separating her meal from her fuel, and she used the fat to light her small lamp in the center of the room. It provided no heat, so she stayed fully bundled in her furs as she gazed at the flickering flame.

When she was a tottering child, no taller than her parents’ waists, her father had pulled her aside and explained that when the time came, she would walk separate from the tribes, same as he.

Only now did she understand the weight of that isolation.

 _I want to go home_. The words, childish and desperate, flitted through her mind like flies.

Sniffing, she whispered them out loud, feeling the syllables stumble from her swollen throat and over her thick tongue. She tried to say it again but was unable, her throat clenching.

Instead, she pawed through the bag the strange men gave her, the contents of which were all she had left of her father. She ran her thumb along the carvings, remembering the nights in their tent when he would painstakingly shape the bones into each totem, showing Silna how best to hold the knife so that she would not cut herself.

She placed a token in each hand, closing her fingers around their smooth edges as she willed herself to remember the happy memories of her father, before their nightmare on the ice.

Heavy feet prowled along the edge of the hut, and Silna dropped the tokens, her eyes wide as she held her breath. Outside, the creature pawed and snorted at the entrance.

A song trickled from the tunnel like rivulets of melting ice, each note breathy and gruff, achingly familiar to the songs she heard her father sing. The song repeated itself, haltingly, until the creature huffed, brushing against the hut with its heaving sides before trudging away.

In a few minutes, she lay down near her lamp, her father’s tokens close beside her. The creature sang to her first, as though it suspected her predicament and took pity upon her. Silna tried to remember the notes it sang, how they mimicked the songs her father would chant.

The gas lamp flickered, and her desire for home rose, unbidden, in her chest again. In the silence of the hut, she closed her eyes and hummed.

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](https://whalersandsailors.tumblr.com)


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